New Harris ad highlights Trump's threat to IVF and military families

Access to fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization continues to supercharge the debate around reproductive rights. Less than a week after Republicans in the Senate blocked the Right to IVF Act, a new ad from Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign seeks to contextualize the inconsistent availability of such procedures, with its added impact on a military family. 

The ad, “Yesenia,” features a military spouse explaining how a lack of federal protections for IVF affects her family. As “patriots,” Yesenia explains that she and her husband “go where he is assigned.” As someone already going through IVF treatments, she ponders what would happen if the couple were to “end up in a state where IVF is no longer legal.”

Though Republican nominee Donald Trump stated in an Aug. 29 interview with NBC News that if elected, he’ll make the government or insurance companies fully pay for IVF, his official platform reiterates the toxic realities of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, stating, “Republicans Will Protect and Defend a Vote of the People, from within the States, on the Issue of Life.”

As Yesenia makes clear, leaving reproductive rights and laws to the states results in different rights for families and patients depending on where they live—or where the military ships them.